LexCraft

Welcome to LexCraft

LexCraft aims to record, refine, and promulgate best practices for electronic legal information publication. It's a place to note both big things (like the OAI4Courts standard, now under development here) and small things (a list of regular expressions for extracting citations to a particular court, or everything you know about US Code section numbering).

Philosophy

The name isn't accidental -- LexCraft is about crafting things with legal text. Of course, there are a lot of things you can do with legal text, and a lot of them overlap other fields. This might not be the place to look for general information about search engines and their theoretical underpinnings. But it might be a place to look for a stopword list for legislation in English, a writeup on a search engine specifically adapted for legal text, or the profile of the research group that developed it, or a bibliography of papers on text retrieval as it specifically applies to legal text. So it's part cookbook, part collection of profiles and bibliographies, part code library...

Where we are right now

Right now the material here is sparse and the organization scheme is not as good as it might be. That'll improve -- be patient with us. This is a volunteer effort for us, too, and things take time. Your contributions will shape our view of what's needed.

Nothing is too big or too small

Meanwhile, we need submissions, and we welcome stubs or very short articles.